Jamie McKendrick's involvement with the work of the Italian poet Valerio Magrelli, which stretches back for more than a decade, arises from a genuine imaginative affinity. In his valuable introduction he writes of "the intensity of recognition" he felt as the possibility of making this book emerged – and it's clear that McKendrick (born 1955) and Magrelli (born 1959) share a combination of meticulous clarity and a sense of mystery. For both poets the task is to present and frame what appears to defeat the understanding.

In Magrelli's early work the keeping of a notebook, purportedly an aide-memoire, begins to generate its own world. It is variously "a shield, / a trench, a periscope, a loophole", and the military context shades over into espionage before the writing takes on miraculous powers, multiplying like the loaves and fishes, and next becoming skin, the sole of a foot rubbed "like an instep / after the day's hard slog". These items sound like parts of a secondary world, but the "actual" world has been usurped in the act of contemplating it. Furthermore, the next poem suggests, the original world is largely forgotten by the traveller-poet now concerned with surviving his experience.

Magrelli's work seems wholly unconcerned with proving itself poetic except in the making of a poem. McKendrick draws an illuminating comparison with the Frenchman Francis Ponge, a poet of spectacular playfulness and obsessive detail. The title poem, "The Embrace", shows the same relish in an extended working-out of comparison, when the embrace of sleeping lovers is compared to a heating system.

In his second collection, Natures and Veinings (1987), Magrelli takes up a Renaissance poetic figure – the eye-beam – and imagines its afterlife: "I've often imagined that looks / outlive the act of seeing / as though they were poles / with measurable trajectories, lances / hurled in a battle." In the next poem, reminiscent of Charles Tomlinson's dramatisation of the visible, Magrelli develops this notion in what seems to be an image of Venice, a city perhaps more than any other built on and sustained by the act of looking. The passage is rendered with superb lightness by McKendrick: "A flying city, self-propelled, / poised upon a forest / of stakes, moving in accord / with the enchantment / of its own weight, with the grace / of its distribution, / leaning, / wavering in a faint tremor, a friction / that will erode it." Never one to let himself off the hook, Magrelli also considers less desirable features of the power that mingles the senses and the world. Tunes stick maddeningly in the head; their erosive effect can be seen, he says, in the interiors of violins, so imagine what they do to us: "worm-eaten with music, / we become light-headed, empty-headed, / as if made of fine lace."

The comedy of the idea doesn't undermine the point. In retrospect we see how the original notebook is an attempt to create a vantage point, an act both doomed and necessary, akin to trying to hold yourself out at arm's length. There are those who might object that this work is too cerebral for comfort, but Magrelli's effort to understand is clearly the product of a passion fired by wit, a passion honoured in the knowledge of its cost, as this brief poem suggests: "I should like, one day, / to be turned to marble, / to be stripped of nerves, / glistening tendons, veins. / Just to be airy enamel, / slaked lime, the striped / tunic of a wind / ground to a halt." A lesser poet (and a lesser translator) would have missed the point: the desired outcome is not, primarily, symbolic of anything. How could it be? A nearby poem considers, as a comic contrast, another change of state, that of milk ("as though / it had turned evil") into cheese, "an occult creature".

Magrelli's 1992 book Typtological Exercises (derived from table-tapping at séances and convicts tapping on pipes to communicate) opens with a kind of nightmare breeziness. "That matter engenders contagion" offers an account of the world in four theses, where biology, history, psychology and physics interweave in a continual process of self-destruction which is shown to be both necessary and inevitable. As Magrelli concludes, "That the form of every production implies / breaking and entry, fission, a final leavetaking / and that history is an act of combustion / and the Earth a tender stockpile of firewood / left out to dry in the sun, // is hard to credit, is it not?" Not when you put it that way. The saturnine wit, economy and impetus recall the work of Zbigniew Herbert, one of the true giants of 20th-century poetry, and there are few greater compliments than that.

Herbert exerted a form of strong pessimism, a readiness to work without hope in the service of a cause long defeated. Perhaps he would have been amused by Magrelli's evocation of one of the contexts in which the hopeless task continues to be carried out. In an eponymous poem, a review page is "Wedged between finance and films, / padded room of a philological / stammer, wafted ribbon of seaweed / jinking in the critical aquarium, / it still holds out. . ." That's the spirit.